New products, Conferences, Books, Papers, Internet of Things

Archive for the ‘wsn-general’ Category

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are complex engineering systems that rely on the integration of physical, computation, and communication processes to function. Theories, algorithms, systems and methodologies developed for CPS are the foundations for applications like Internet of Things, industrial internet and automation, smart transportations, smart grids, smart cities, buildings and homes, data centers, health care, wellbeing and so on. Such systems must be operated safely, dependably, securely, efficiently and in real-time. Advances in this field will have great technical, economic and societal impacts in the near future. Since 2008, CPS Week is the premier forum for academic, industry, and governmental researchers to present latest research results and exchange ideas on all aspects of CPS.

CPS Week 2015 will be held in the beautiful city of Seattle, Washington, USA.

The SenSys 2014 Doctoral Colloquium seeks to provide a friendly, supportive, and constructive environment where PhD students can present their research in progress for an open discussion guided by a panel of experienced researchers and practitioners.

The DC will be structured as a series of short presentations by the students followed by individual discussions, feedback, and advise. The student presentations will be interleaved with speeches by leading researchers, who will provide their own perspectives on current and future research trends in networked sensing, as well as on how to best purse a Ph.D. in this field. Participating students will also have the opportunity to present a poster during the main conference to leverage further interaction with SENSYS attendees.

You can connect almost anything to a computer network. Light bulbs. Thermostats. Coffee makers. Even badgers. Yes, badgers.

Badgers spend a lot of time underground, which make it difficult for biologists and zoologists to track their whereabouts and activities. GPS, for example, doesn’t work well underground or in enclosed areas. But about five years ago, University of Oxford researchers Andrew Markham and Niki Trigonisolved that problem by inventing a wireless tracking system that can work underground. Their system is clever, but they didn’t do it alone. Like many other scientists, they turned to open source to avoid having to rebuild fundamental components from scratch. One building block they used is an open source operating system called Contiki.

“Contiki was a real enabler as it allowed us to do rapid prototyping and easily shift between different hardware platforms,” says Markham, now an associate professor at the University of Oxford.

Contiki isn’t nearly so well-known as Windows or OS X or even Linux, but for more than a decade, it has been the go-to operating system for hackers, academics, and companies building network-connected devices like sensors, trackers, and web-based automation systems. Developers love it because it’s lightweight, it’s free, and it’s mature. It provides a foundation for developers and entrepreneurs eager to bring us all the internet-connected gadgets the internet of things promises, without having to develop the underlying operating system those gadgets will need.

Perhaps the biggest thing Contiki has going for it is that it’s small. Really small. While Linux requires one megabyte of RAM, Contiki needs just a few kilobytes to run. Its inventor, Adam Dunkels, has managed to fit an entire operating system, including a graphical user interface, networking software, and a web browser into less than 30 kilobytes of space. That makes it much easier to run on small, low powered chips–exactly the sort of things used for connected devices–but it’s also been ported to many older systems like the Apple IIe and the Commodore 64.

The D3S group invites applications for two PhD positions in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). D3S is a cross-institution research group focusing on dynamic, decentralized, distributed systems.

In the context of WSNs, the D3S group has been particularly successful in bringing research results into real-world, long-term, operational deployments. Examples are the structural health monitoring of a medieval tower, and the closed-loop control of lighting in a road tunnel. The scientific results of these projects received the Best Paper Award at IPSN (both in 2009 and 2011) and the Mark Weiser Best Paper Award at PerCom 2012.

Other ongoing projects include: i) a project aimed at large-scale monitoring of the environment and the wildlife dwelling in it; ii) a cross-disciplinary project on smart spaces; iii) a follow-up project of the road tunnel deployment, investigating energy-harvesting devices and wireless actuation.

Although we emphasize real-world applications as a motivation and a concrete opportunity for the validation of our research, the latter is not limited to the immediate needs of WSN deployments. We perform a mix of curiosity-driven and application-driven research. The research challenges tackled by D3S span a broad set of topics, ranging from low-layer issues concerned with the characterization and design of communication protocols to higher-layer issues related with programming platforms and software architectures for WSNs.

New PhD students are invited to participate in ongoing projects to gain experience and insight into real systems, and to identify novel, challenging problems whose solutions break new grounds. The D3S group, and Trento at large, provide a fertile environment for high-quality research: two of our PhD students received the Best Ph.D. Thesis Award at the European Conference on Wireless Sensor Networks (EWSN) in 2009 and 2012.

The Open Garden platform consist of three different kits, each ready for a specific kind of growing plant scenario: indoor houses and greenhouses, outdoor gardens and fields and hydroponics plants in water installations.

The platform allows to control the state of the plants by sensing several parameters:

Soil moisture (Indoor & Outdoor kits)

Temperature + Humidity + Light (All kits)

Water sensors: pH, Conductivity, Temperature (Hydroponics kit

Then it uses different types of actuators to modify the state of the plants by irrigating them or activating lights and oxygen pumps:

Water pump + Droppers for Drip Irrigation (Indoor kit)

Electro valve + Sprinkler for Sprinkling (Outdoor kit)

Oxygen Pump + Growing Light (Hydroponics kit)

The nodes send periodically the information to the Gateway that uploads the data to a web server by using any of the available wireless interfaces WiFi, GPRS, 3G. We have also designed a web application that allows to store in a data base the information gathered and visualize it from a browser and iPhone / Android device. We have released it as open source code so that you can improve it and make it personal for your own product!!

Open Garden has been designed to work with both 220V Europe & 110V US.

As we equip people, places, and commodities with Internet-connected embedded devices that can sense information about the environment and subsequently take action, we will create the Internet of Things (IoT). The IoT will improve society and quality of life, but making this vision a reality requires interdisciplinary efforts in a range of scientific domains. Specifically, enabling the design, implementation, validation, and real-world use of IoT software requires that we embrace diverse contributions in coherent and practical development frameworks, possibly based on current and future standards.

This special issue seeks contributions about recent or ongoing research efforts, experience reports, and success stories in enabling an effective development of IoT software out of the individual building blocks available in different communities. Topics of interest include:

It’s no secret that developing apps for the Internet of Things (IoT) requires formidable knowledge of programming. Under IoT, billions of devices will be reporting data about themselves, which means millions of new applications in areas as diverse as medicine to automobile maintenance.

A New York, USA based company Bug Labs is launching a service from today called Freeboard, which is actually a one click way to publish data from an IoT “thing” to its own Web page. This modular development platform, says Bug Labs, will do for IoT what Dropbox did for Cloud storage – make building and deploying innovative, enterprise-class IoT applications quick.

Freeboard makes “sense” of vast streams of data. A few clicks create quick graphical displays of the shared information, such as location, temperature, or whether the device is on or off.

The platform’s introductory software module called dweet.io was released this March itself. It handled the first piece of the IoT application development puzzle – getting a device Online and publishing data. Combined, dweet.io + Freeboard will give amateur developers all they need to put together a rock solid IoT application quickly and easily, claimed its makers, Bug Labs. Also, because they are modular they can be used individually and/or in conjunction with other open, 3rd-party platforms. Both tools are available for free.